


Hologram Blue

by laireshi



Category: Marvel 616, New Avengers (Comics)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Civil War (Marvel), Dubious Consent, Extremis, Hallucinations, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-01-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:14:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22091659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laireshi/pseuds/laireshi
Summary: During the Superhero Civil War, Tony gets haunted by hallucinations of Steve.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 7
Kudos: 135
Collections: 2019 Captain America/Iron Man Holiday Exchange





	Hologram Blue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [navaan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/gifts).



> Thanks to runningondreams for beta!
> 
> I hope you enjoy this, navaan. Your prompts were just the best.

The first time was inconspicuous, easy to write off as an effect of a too tired and too stressed mind, an optical illusion there and gone in a blink of an eyes; his brain conjuring his greatest desire to, what, remind him just how completely he’d fucked everything up?

He _would_ hate himself enough just for that.

So Tony didn’t pay any heed to this brief moment when he thought he’d seen Steve standing in his lab, staring down the Extremis armour like it personally offended him.

(He definitely didn’t take it as a hint to go to bed and get some rest, either; wasn’t Extremis supposed to make him better anyway? That he still needed to sleep was clearly a bug and not a feature.)

***

The second time was harder to ignore. 

He sat in Reed’s lab and tried to hash out strategy with him, a task made considerably more difficult by the see-through, mostly bluish illusion of Captain America standing with his arms crossed next to Reed, radiating judgement even if he wasn’t actually there. Or real. 

_Hey, can you see him_ , Tony thought of asking, but he was rather sure Reed _would_ comment on the apparition if that was the case, and so it was all in Tony’s head.

 _Ignore it_ , he told himself, and tried to find the best way to stop and contain their _friends_ in this war they were now fighting, crueller than any fight they’d waged against most wanted criminals. 

Maybe the image of Steve was his conscience trying to reach him; too bad he had a lot of experience in ignoring it.

Tony returned home after that, marched straight to his bedroom, lay down, and sent Extremis a command to knock him out for a few hours.

It didn’t help.

***

There was a third time, too. 

Tony was getting dressed, in the middle of buttoning up his shirt, when he saw him. Steve was looking straight at him with an eerie intensity, almost as if he could see him, and Tony suddenly couldn’t move under the weight of his gaze. Steve’s stare on his skin felt almost tangible, like he could trace the points Steve focused on, and Tony stood there with his hands raised to close another button, still as a statue, as if moving meant alerting a predator to his presence.

Steve slowly, so very slowly, walked up to him; slower still reached out for him.

Tony held his breath.

Steve was a figment of his imagination. Tony couldn’t touch him, not to hurt him, not to . . . Not that he would, anyway. All Tony had to do was keep still until Steve touched him, to prove to himself that it was a simple hallucination, that he couldn’t feel the touch, that it was all inside his head.

He flinched violently seconds before Steve’s fingers would have connected with his chest.

Steve was gone.

Tony ran debugging processes in the back of his mind, but everything was fine; he’d made sure to upgrade his security considerably after being hacked once, and those measures still held.

***

After that he told himself he lost count, like Extremis didn’t save his memories perfectly, like he couldn’t access them at any moment, like there wasn’t a fucking subroutine set in his brain cataloguing all the occurrences and trying to find a common trigger or explanation, all for nothing.

The fourth time sounded worse than just _the next time_ , though, and so Tony settled for the latter.

The next time, then, Extremis was knitting Tony’s jaw back together as Steve stood next to him with an expression full of contempt on his face.

“Did you really think you deserved my _trust_?” he asked.

“Geez, I don’t know, maybe I thought Captain America wouldn’t EMP his friend,” Tony snapped, tired and aching; knowing, as he said the words, what Steve’s reply would be; knowing too that Steve would be right.

Sure enough, Steve answered, “ _Friend_ , is that what you are? You betrayed us, Tony.”

Tony was trying to _save_ them, but that didn’t mean the betrayal was any less real. He closed his eyes in lieu of replying. His memory of the real Steve punching him was all too vivid. He didn’t need his mind playing tricks on him to judge him some more.

Steve shook him by his arms. “Don’t you dare ignore me!” 

Tony’s eyes shot open in surprise, the pain from where Steve was gripping him not registering against the shock of having him touch him at all. “You—”

“You should’ve learnt earlier,” Steve whispered, leaning in so that his breath was ghosting over Tony’s cheek, his lips so close Tony could almost feel them, soft and wet. “Nothing is unreal with Extremis.”

Only it had to be, because Tony was not ready to admit he was going mad. He wrestled himself out of Steve’s grasp, called the armour to him.

When it safely embraced him and hid him from the outside world, he was alone in his room once more.

(But after, oh, he should really stop that subroutine counting Steve’s appearances and start another one instead: count the times when he was alone and Steve’s high-tech ghost/hallucination was not right at the edge of his vision.)

***

His days were never free of Steve and while he had once craved Steve’s company, this Extremis mockery of him was far from what Tony had wanted. He was free in his dreams, but even that had only lasted so long. 

He’d always known Steve would be his undoing.

In his dream, or maybe a nightmare, he didn’t have an armour. There was just Tony Stark, the messed up human failing at trying to be a superhero, and an empty, nondescript room that he didn’t recognise: a bed, grey walls, dirty carpet. He looked outside the window instead and saw New York, but something was wrong: he recognised the silhouette of the Avengers Tower, but the logo on it was SHIELD instead.

“Isn’t that what you want?” Steve asked.

Tony swirled around only to find himself face to face with Captain America, the perfect soldier.

Was there even a point in trying to argue with him inside Tony’s own fucking dream? Not even his own brain would listen, it seemed.

Steve was scanning the room they were in. He raised an eyebrow. “And _this_ is where you brought us. I don’t know why I’m surprised, really. The only thing missing is a bottle. Tony Stark could never handle himself, could you?”

With a sick feeling to his stomach, Tony realised he _did_ know the room. He had been in a cheap motel like this with Steve once before.

Only the real place certainly didn’t have windows facing the Avengers Tower.

“Why are you here?” Tony asked, resigned.

Steve tilted his head. “Think of me as your conscience,” he suggested drily. “There’s still a part of you that knows that what you’re doing is wrong.”

“It’s the only option,” Tony whispered.

“Of course you’d say that,” Steve said. “But then, I don’t really care for your excuses.”

He kissed Tony like it was inevitable, like the horrific motel room didn’t matter, like they didn’t hate each other in the real world.

(Maybe this, here, was real instead.)

Tony kissed him back because this much _was_ inevitable; he was never going to say _no_ when Steve was asking. He had dreamt of it, and he was dreaming still, and if this was the only way he’d ever have Steve, so be it; he didn’t think he had any self-respect left in any case.

(Later, he woke up with sticky sheets like he was a teenager still, but when he rolled over to get up, the other half of the bed was warm; Steve’s scent clinging to the covers.)

***

Tony was so tired. Sleeping didn’t quite feel safe anymore, so he avoided that, and he’d say that Extremis helped, only he still saw Steve wherever he went; in tactics meetings or in the lab with Reed and Hank or standing in first row when PR needed Tony to put on a designer suit and a smile and lie to the cameras through his teeth.

Undressing after such an event, with the apparition Steve asking mockingly, “Need help with that?”

Tony ignored him. 

“You weren’t so shy the last time,” Steve said.

Right, because clearly this fake Steve knew Tony slept with fake Steve in his head; all those fake Steves were one Steve, maybe one messed up section of his brain with its own allocated memory, and he couldn’t find the bug and fix it.

He needed a break so fucking badly.

“Break,” Steve replied incredulously, and Tony realised he’d said that out loud. “Break from what, exactly, _Iron Man_? Hunting your friends down?”

“If only you _listened_ ,” Tony said, but this not-Steve was close to the original and just as stubborn.

He pushed Tony against the wall, his forearm on Tony’s throat, just shy of constricting his air.

“We have to work with them,” Tony said uselessly. 

Steve hit him.

“You used to be a hero,” he spat, and then he was gone.

(Next morning, Tony sported a black eye, but it was okay; he’d just leave his armour on from now on.)

***

Rounding up the anti-registration heroes was hard, and not just because Tony didn’t _want_ to do it. There were times when he could and had let them go; there were also the times when he couldn’t afford to do it, when putting someone in cell, inhuman and immoral as it might’ve been, was the way to save them from Sentinels. 

Just for now. Just for the time being. Just until he could do something better with the Registration bill. 

But it wasn’t working.

“It’s like they can guess our moves,” Carol commented, voicing what Tony was thinking.

“I doubt they have any prophets,” he murmured, because exhaustion had seeped so deeply into his bones it felt like an integral part of him. He hated fighting his friends; he hated more the thought of having a mole, wasting time figuring out who to trust.

(No one.)

Steve’s smile behind Carol’s head was taunting.

***

Tony couldn’t take it anymore, which was why he contacted Steve on the old Avengers frequency. No one else but him would pick it up, and Tony needed to talk to him: the man made from flesh and bones, not a twisted memory supported by Extremis.

The ruins of the Avengers Mansion were a good metaphor for their friendship. Steve came on time, of course; his digital ghost was thankfully absent.

“What did you want?” he asked brusquely.

Tony opened his mouth and closed it. _Did you hack my systems_ was a ridiculous question, especially since Steve wouldn’t need to hack anything; Tony never changed his overrides.

And Steve wouldn’t use them against him. This much, Tony was certain of. Steve, unlike him, was a man of honour. 

Steve didn’t seem bothered by Tony’s silence. “Take off that mask,” he ordered, and Tony complied. The touch of air on his skin was nothing short of shocking; it had been days.

“Please, Steve,” Tony let out almost against himself. “Just . . . try to understand.”

“Why?” Steve asked. “Because you convinced yourself it’s the only option?”

“ _Because it is_!” Tony screamed. 

“You seem on edge,” Steve said conversationally. “Betraying your friends isn’t all you thought it’d be?”

Tony couldn’t talk to him, not after weeks on end of seeing Extremis call up a version of him with the apparent sole purpose of tormenting Tony. 

“I won’t let you destroy us, Tony,” Steve said, advancing on Tony like a predator. “I won’t let you destroy yourself, either.”

“I don’t think that’s something you should worry about,” Tony snapped. “I’m sure organising illegal resistance is all too time-consuming.”

Steve shrugged. “I’ll always have time for you. Think of me as your conscience.”

Tony flinched violently, reminded of what the dream Steve had said. It couldn’t be. Maybe this wasn’t the real Steve after all. Maybe it was all inside Tony’s head, and the real Steve was late. Maybe—

Steve kissed him, angry and violent again, and the fact that he could touch Tony and Tony could feel it meant nothing anymore.

“ _I won’t let you_ ,” Steve repeated, and Tony stared into his bright blue eyes and tried to find his answers in them.

There were none.


End file.
